Is Loughner insane or just evil?

He is, according to the media, “an insane young man.” And his “madness was shaped by a broader climate of paranoia.”

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“Get something straight,” one media columnist wrote. “The lunatic in Tucson killed people because he was mentally ill.” (And one would have to admit that anyone who covers the media for a living would know a thing or two about insanity.)

Time magazine began its story by saying: “Navigating the cluttered corridors of Jared Loughner’s mind will take psychiatrists months or years. We will likely never know all the reasons he took a cab to that Safeway on Jan. 8, paid with a $20 bill, calmly got his change and then killed six people and wounded 14 others. ... Pinpointing the precise moment a mental illness takes root is guesswork at best.”

(Call me old-fashioned, but I come from the school of journalism that still requires phrases like he “allegedly” killed six people or he is a murder “suspect” — plus, the number of wounded is now recognized as 13, not 14. It’s not that I personally doubt Loughner’s guilt; it’s just that I don’t think newsmagazines should have the power to convict people.)

In any case, Loughner is a loon. Bonkers. Nutso. Three fries short of a Happy Meal. The media have so ruled.

Which leaves me with just one question: What ever happened to evil?

Why have we rushed to the judgment of insanity? Legally, very few defendants are found guilty of insanity. I covered virtually every day of the trial of John Wayne Gacy, a guy who raped and murdered 33 young men and boys and buried 26 of them in the crawl space of his home.

Any guy who does that has to be crazy, right? He has to be possessed of “inner demons” that cause his “madness,” right? Because no sane person could do such a terrible thing, right? Except a sane person can. A jury said so, and Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 22, 1994. (I interviewed him by phone in prison before he was executed, and he seemed normal to the point of being boring.)